But perhaps one day I will be entrusted with daughters of my own, and if so, I swear I will not see their minds molded into society's simpering ideal of womanhood. Oh how I would like to raise writers...
And yet [Tequamuck] refuses to see that God prospers you, and protects you, and keeps from you the sicknesses against which his powers are as nothing. So, this do I see: We must find favor with your G...
A sofer must fill his mind with only the holy letters. He could not be distracted by daily things. Leshem ketivah haggadah shel Pesach, he whispered to himself again, trying to quiet his mind. His han...
So this was how it was to be, now: I would do my best to live in the quick world, but the ghosts of the dead would be ever at hand.
Who they were, or how they worked. That’s how I add my few grains to the sandbox of human knowledge. It’s what I love best about what I do. And there were so many
The women began traveling to remote villages, distributing articles that argued not just against honor killings but also against forced marriages and the pernicious way gossip is used in small communi...
The man who has been wealthy is dunned more civilly than the fellow who has ever been poor.
Fundamentalists asked that a male answer questions directed to her, on the grounds that a woman’s voice is too alluring to be heard in mixed company. Nadia
Asked how, if he never had spoken before to women outside his family, he was able to serve as spiritual counselor to the village women. My friend looked at me strangely. They put their problems to him...
You can ask for things, but you can’t just reach out and take things as if it’s your right. A
When I looked at my hands and wrists, marred by the marks of small burns from cook pots and flying embers, every red weal or white pucker brings to my mind's eye that eternal fire, and the writhing ma...
This is how an owl must look to a mouse in that last second before the talons sink into the flesh.
The practice of mutilating women’s genitals in Eritrea predated the arrival of both religions, and for hundreds of years neither faith had questioned it. The
The drill sergeants learned that lavishly praising recruits who got it right worked better than abusing those who got it wrong. The women had been raised to please, Tracy Borum discovered,
Such laws can be even more humiliating for older women. A widowed grandmother, for example, may have to rely on the permission of a grandson if he is her closest male relative.
My mother was an excellent woman. Pious, virtuous. Kind. But she was not the intellectual equal of my father. Not by any means. I do not speak of book learning. I speak of a certain innate quality of...
Many men believe in the saying that educating women is like allowing the nose of the camel into the tent: eventually the beast will edge in and take up all the room inside.
Josip had only an instant to exchange a glance with Serif. He made it the most eloquent glance of his life.
I wanted to give a sense of the people of the book, the different hands that had made it, used it, protected it.
I never promised I would write the truth. I